A growing number of South Korean companies are opening Twitter accounts to better connect with consumers and generate buzz for their products. However, industrial heavyweights such as Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, SK Group and Lotte Group are not among them. Should they decide to join the 140-word Web phenomenon, they will have to acknowledge that they will be unable to use their own corporate brands.

A Twitter account created under Samsung's name has been currently suspended by the Internet company due to "strange activity," which could mean anything from service violations, technical abuse and spam distribution.

Worried that your relationship is going south? Maybe it's time to get off Facebook. A study released by the University of Guelph in Ontario shows that the Facebook social network increases jealousy in users' romantic relationships. The study, which was published in the latest issue of CyberPsychology and Behaviour, concluded that the more time people spend on Facebook, the more jealous they get.

"This may include details about their partner's friendships and social exchanges, especially interactions with previous romantic or sexual partners." The simple availability of information -- whether it's a girlfriend's posts, or photos and details about her friends and exes -- seems to increase a person's desire to search for even more information, say researchers.

The outage that knocked Twitter offline for hours was traced to an attack on a lone blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia - but the collateral damage that left millions around the world tweetless showed just how much havoc an isolated cyberdispute can cause.

"It told us how quickly many people really took Twitter into their hearts," Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said Friday. Tens of millions of people have come to rely on social media to express their innermost thoughts and to keep up with world news and celebrity gossip. Twitter "is one of those little amusements that infiltrated the mass behavior in some significant ways, so that when it went away, a lot of people really noticed it and missed it."

A Latvian ISP linked to online criminal activity has been cut off from the Internet, following complaints from Internet security researchers. Real Host, based in Riga, Latvia was thought to control command-and-control servers for infected botnet PCs, and had been linked to phishing sites, Web sites that launched attack code at visitors and were also home to malicious "rogue" antivirus products.

"This is maybe one of the top European centers of crap," he said in an e-mail interview. Real Host was considered a "bullet proof" hosting provider, that would allow customers to remain online even after they had been linked to malicious activity.

A group of teenagers have reacted to warnings that using sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace can leave them traumatised. The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, says the sites encourage users to value the number rather than quality of friends they have.

He’s worried this makes people get too many temporary friends instead of real, genuine ones. He said: “It’s an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up identity. "Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right.”

The distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that knocked out Twitter for hours and affected other sites like Facebook, Google's Blogger, and LiveJournal on Thursday continued all day Friday and may persist throughout the weekend. In its latest update, posted to a discussion forum of its third-party developers at 11 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday, Twitter reports it's still fighting the attacks.

"The DDoS attack is still ongoing, and the intensity has not decreased at all," wrote Chad Etzel, from Twitter's application development platform support team.

One of Israel's main political parties has shut down its website following an attack by Palestinian hackers, according to reports. Attackers on the official Kadima website posted images of wounded Palestinians and the aftermath of suicide bombings in Israel.

Slogans in both Hebrew and Arabic were also placed on the site, including threats to party leader Tzipi Livni. Kadima, a centrist political party that favours a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict, is the largest party in the Israeli parliament.

Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers. Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms.

The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe. Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

A suspected pedophile surrendered to police after German law enforcement published clips from videos of child pornography allegedly showing the man. The German Federal Criminal Investigations Office also posted several photos and audio samples of the man's voice as they reached out to the public for clues leading to his arrest.

Police said they found about 42 videos in which the suspected pedophile abused children, believed to be between the ages of 5 and 7 at the time. The Investigator's Office said the man used violence against the children in some of the clips. The German Federal Criminal Investigations Office has been using technology to combat child pornography for several years.

The US Marine Corps on Tuesday renewed a ban on Twitter and other social networking sites as the Pentagon weighed a similar prohibition over cybersecurity concerns. The Marines had already banned the use of social media on military networks but issued a more detailed order this week defining which sites were out of bounds and noting possible exceptions to the rule, Marine Corps spokesman Lieutenant Craig Thomas told AFP.

"These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," the Marine Corps said in an order posted on its website.

In hindsight, it seems so obvious. We look back at the creepy online ramblings of a tortured soul like George Sodini and realize we should have known all along of the horrors to come. That is, if anyone actually read Sodini's Web page before he sprayed bullets into a suburban Pittsburgh fitness class, killing three women and then himself.

Certainly, anyone happening upon Sodini's tortured online thoughts before his rampage Tuesday would have had ample cause for alarm. His date of death is listed right at the top, under his name and birthdate: "DOD 8/4/2009." Later, a description of his first attempt at what he calls "this project," in January. "It is 8:45 p.m.: I chickened out! I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!" And then, on Monday: "Tomorrow is the big day."

Police are searching for a missing schoolgirl, believed to have run away with a man she met on the internet site Bebo. Clare Haver, 14, of Bourne, Lincolnshire, has been missing since July 25 and is thought to be with 23-year-old Michael Ellis. Police revealed today that Ellis has mental health issues and appealed for Haver to return to her family.

She met jobless Ellis, of Lincoln, on the social networking site Bebo seven months ago. The week before last he joined her while she was on a camping trip with a friend in Skegness.

Parents have been warned of a new teenage trend of "sexting", in which children exchange explicit photos of themselves by text. More than a third of secondary school children have been sent messages containing sexual content, a survey showed.

Researchers found youngsters were regularly being sent sex texts or "sexts" - often by their school friends. The messages contain images of sex acts involving young people but more generally of boys and girls exposing themselves. Material is sent to mobile phones via texts, transferred using Bluetooth or uploaded to social networking groups. Girls are bullied into taking, and sharing, explicit pictures of themselves, the charity warned.

A teenager was allegedly beaten to death by trainers at a rehabilitation camp in southern China where his parents had sent him to cure his Internet addiction, reports said Tuesday.

The three supervisors who allegedly beat Deng Senshan, 16, were arrested after the boy's death early Sunday, his father Deng Fei told the Global Times. "We are investigating a case where a high school student was beaten to death by his camp supervisors. The case is still under investigation," a police officer in Nanning, Guangxi region, was quoted as saying.

More than 10 million of the country's 100 million teenage web surfers are Internet addicts, the China Daily said, citing a survey by the China Youth Internet Association last year.

High-tech Japan is gearing up for elections, but you won't hear a tweet from Prime Minister Taro Aso or his main rivals. When election campaigning officially begins on August 18, a cyberspace ban will make it illegal for politicians to update their Internet blogs, share their political views by email or put new videos online.

It is an odd situation in one of the world's most wired countries, where more than 60 percent of the population regularly uses the Internet. Japanese politicians "are missing a real chance to try to generate interest among young voters by not allowing cyber campaigning," said Professor Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo.

Chinese hackers crashed the website of Australia's biggest film festival, organisers said on Saturday, escalating tensions over a visit here by the exiled leader of the Uighur minority. Online bookings for the Melbourne International Film Festival had to be shut down after the site was bombarded with phony purchases which resulted in the entire program being sold out, said festival spokeswoman Asha Holmes.

A Chinese citizen living in the United States had alerted organisers to the viral campaign, which originated from a website in China titled "A Call to Action to All Chinese People", said Holmes.

A powerful new type of Internet attack works like a telephone tap, except operates between computers and Web sites they trust.

Hackers at the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences have revealed a serious flaw in the way Web browsers weed out untrustworthy sites and block anybody from seeing them. If a criminal infiltrates a network, he can set up a secret eavesdropping post and capture credit card numbers, passwords and other sensitive data flowing between computers on that network and sites their browsers have deemed safe.

Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are inceasingly being targeted by cyber-criminals drawn to the wealth of personal information supplied by users, experts warn. Data posted on the sites -- name, date of birth, address, job details, email and phone numbers -- is a windfall for hackers, participants at Campus Party, one of the world's biggest gatherings of Internet enthusiasts, said.

A vicious virus Koobface -- "koob" being "book" in reverse -- has affected thousands Facebook and Twitter users since August 2008, said Asier Martinez, a security specialist at global IT solutions provider Panda Security.

Microsoft released a security patch on Tuesday aimed at preventing hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in its Web browser, Internet Explorer.

The US software giant said that the security update would be automatically installed for Internet Explorer users who have automatic updating enabled on their computers but would need to be installed manually by other users. "These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer," Microsoft said.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is about to rule whether health care entities will need to notify patients if their de-identified data -- patient data that has been stripped of all potential for identifying individuals, which is often used for research and development -- is breached. As it stands now, de-identified data is not subject to the new breach-notification rules imposed by the HITECH privacy provisions of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus package. The debate pits privacy activists on the one side -- who often support notification -- with health care organizations on the other, which say the quality of health care hangs in the balance.

China has banned Web sites from advertising or linking to games that glamorize violence, another step in China's censorship campaign aimed at ensuring social stability ahead of the 60th anniversary of communist rule on Oct. 1.

A notice posted on the Culture Ministry Web site on Monday said games that promote drug use, obscenities, gambling, or crimes such as rape, vandalism and theft are "against public morality and the nation's fine cultural traditions." "Such online games promote the glorification of mafia life ... and are a serious threat to the moral standards of society causing vulnerable young people to be adversely affected," the notice said. The ban on the Web sites starts immediately.

Amid concerns that the U.S. has a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, a new consortium of U.S. government and private organizations aims to identify students with strong computer skills and train them as cybersecurity guardians, warriors and "top guns."

The U.S. Cyber Challenge initiative will bring together three cybersecurity competitions for high school or college students and launch new in-person competitions, said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training organization. The organizers of the U.S. Cyber Challenge also plan to offer scholarships to promising students and hook them up with internships and jobs, Paller said.

An undersea cable plugging east Africa into high speed Internet access went live Thursday, providing an alternative to expensive satellite connections.

SEACOM, the cable provider company, opened its 17,000 kilometer submarine cable, capable of 1.28 terabytes per second, allowing the region true connectivity. Most Africans rely on expensive and slow satellite connections, which make the use of applications such as YouTube and Facebook extremely trying. "This is going to reduce the cost of doing business in Africa, within Africa and with international parties" said Suveer Ramdhani, SEACOM spokesman in South Africa.

Russia's most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security.

In partnership with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's political party, the lobby created a working group to draft legal safeguards against what they said were the risks of Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services.

The number of Internet users in China is now greater than the entire population of the United States, after rising to 338 million by the end of June, state media reported Sunday.

China's online population, the largest in the world, rose by 40 million in the first six months of 2009, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing a report by the China Internet Network Information Center. The number of broadband Internet connections rose by 10 million to 93.5 million in the first half of the year, the report said.

The news report begins with shots of a tense space shuttle launch. Engineers hunch over computer banks and techno music pounds in the background. There is a countdown, a lift-off, and then you see a young man in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, apparently reporting from space.

This is the Hacker News Network, and after a decade offline it is lifting off again, this time with a quirky brand of video reports about security. They're the guys who famously told the U.S. Congress that they could take down the Internet in about 30 minutes, and who helped invent the way that security bugs are reported to computer companies.

The first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa has gone live. The fibre-optic cable, operated by African-owned firm Seacom, connects South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia.

Five institutions are already benefiting from the faster speeds - national electricity company Tanesco, communications company, TTCL, Tanzania Railways and the Universities of Dar es Salaam and Dodoma.

Federal agencies are facing a severe shortage of computer specialists, even as a growing wave of coordinated cyberattacks against the government poses potential national security risks, a private study found.

The study describes a fragmented federal cyber force, where no one is in charge of overall planning and government agencies are "on their own and sometimes working at cross purposes or in competition with one another." The report, scheduled to be released Wednesday, arrives in the wake of a series of cyberattacks this month that shut down some U.S. and South Korean government and financial Web sites.

Hackers will soon gain a powerful new tool for breaking into Oracle Corp's (ORCL.O) database, the top-selling business software used by companies to store electronic information.

Security experts have developed an easy-to-use, automated software tool that can remotely break into Oracle databases over the Internet to simulate attacks on computer systems, but cybercrooks can use it for hacking. The tool's authors created it through a controversial open-source software project known as Metasploit, which releases its free software over the Web.

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